“Yup.” Nerka peered down the underwater tunnel they had passed through. “Yeah, if I had to guess, I’d say he grabbed her back at the fork.”

“Larya.” Snatch rubbed his eyes, his jaw clenched hard enough to crack macadamias. “Goddammit. Can’t we have one mission where she doesn’t run off to fuck something?”

“I’m sure it’s not her fault.” Nerka rubbed her arm. The mermaid shuddered slightly at the sensation, making Snatch suspect that this was not purely an expression of nervousness. “Mylio can be ... domineering.”

“Right. Right.” Snatch spat to the side. As he and his mermaid companion were currently situated several thousand meters below the surface of the ocean and only avoiding being crushed by the sheer pressure thanks to druidic magic, this accomplished very little. Typical. “Always not her fault. Course it ain’t. You don’t see me getting dragged off and … but her, she just can’t help it, can she?”

“She does this ... often, then?” Nerka’s salmon-like fish tail flicked slightly. She ran her fingers through her long white braids, failing to keep the touch of arousal from her voice.

“She fucked you, didn’t she?”

Nerka went bright red.

Snatch grimaced. He turned and looked ahead, then started walking. ’Course, I don’t imagine you asked. Shit, Larya, what are we doing helping these bastards?

“Wait! Mister ... Snatch.” Nerka swam up alongside him. “Wait, is that really your real name? You do know that it—”

“Yes,” Snatch said, through gritted teeth, “I know what it also means. Thank you, fishperson, for reminding me. It didn’t mean that when ... It was just a thief name before. When I was a proper thief and not a goddamn babysitter for morally deluded—”

“Well, I was just—aren’t we going back for them?”

“For the ‘landwhore’ and your idiot mate?” Snatch snorted. “Look, Larya gets in a lot of stupid situations, but she’s the scariest druid I’ve ever met. If Mylio tries to physically make her do anything she doesn’t want, she’ll just kill him.” He brightened for a moment at the thought. Then realization hit him, and he sighed. “Or capture him. She’d probably capture him. So unless he’s some sort of hypnotist, Larya can handle herself. If she wants to run—or swim—off to get fondled by fish, that’s her deal.”

He stopped. He was not used to using this many words at once, and the effect was getting rather disconcerting.

Nerka still seemed worried. “No, he’s not a hypnotist. The arts of fey mind control were lost to us during the wars. So you propose to just ... leave them? Will we go back for them later?”

Snatch turned to her, feeling almost offended. “Of course we’ll go back for them later. What kind of bullshit question is that? It’s not like I can leave Larya down here, no matter how much I’d like to. I mean, she’s my—” We are not partners. I do not have partners. “—She ... exists and we do things in the same place, okay?”

“Oookay.” Nerka shrugged and rolled her eyes, giving a small laugh.

“Anyways, I just want to check this place out first.” Snatch pointed ahead, towards the strange light. “Since we’re already split up—” He almost threw up a little as he said it. “—might as well check it out now, in case it’s not here when we get back. It’s a funny thing. There ain’t supposed to be lights down here, right?”

“Well, not exactly. I mean, there are lantern fish and such, but they wouldn’t generally be found this high up.” Nerka looked around. “Not that we’re exactly high up. Geologically speaking, I must say, I have trouble believing a cave this deep is even possible. Doesn’t it sort of break the laws of physics?”

Surface-huggers. Do they have to question everything?

Snatch just kept walking, though he kept his spear at the ready. He sort of regretted leaving Larya behind now, if only because (because there would certainly be no sentimental reason) she was pretty handy in a fight. Nerka still wasn’t armed, or armored, or, indeed, clothed in any way.

In fact, the way she kept … bouncing was getting increasingly distracting.

Snatch tried to put them out of his mind. He could only assume Nerka had some means of defending herself, as a fey. If not, and they had to rely solely on his brawn ... well, they were probably pretty fucked. But Mylio had guaranteed that these sex-crazed whatever-they-weres only went after females. So maybe only Nerka was pretty fucked. That thought brought him comfort.

As they drew closer, Snatch started to walk faster. Because as he drew closer, he began to realize that it was a girl.

The hall did not end here, but it did dip down before continuing. Before them was a fishbowl-shaped dropoff. And at the bottom lay a strange sort of mermaid.

Nerka came up behind him, nearly knocking him into the pit. He didn’t react. Over his shoulder, he heard her gasp. “A jelly maid. How did she get down here?”

Snatch stared down at the ghostly beauty, lying on the cavern floor. Her skin was extremely pale, with a blueish tint, closely matching the long tendrils trailing beneath her waist. Some of those tentacles were very thin, and along with a translucent, silky mass rather like the top of a jellyfish, they descended around the rest of her like a highly immodest skirt. The rest, residing right where legs would generally be, trailed from her hips—great, fluffy-looking things, feathery and almost luminescent. These were much thicker and extended perhaps ten feet. They coiled around her like a wreath of white flames.

She was a jellyfish mermaid. How did that work? Weren’t jellyfish not even fish? Snatch did not understand marine biology.

He was jolted out of such thoughts by a loud moan. The “jelly maid” twisted and spasmed, her tentacles writhing weakly. Snatch stared blankly.

Merfolk didn’t have sex organs, but it didn’t take a marine biologist to recognize a mermaid’s orgasm.

“What the fuck?” he muttered.

The jelly girl’s eyes opened. They were a solid pink, without even a trace of green in them. Snatch knew that wasn’t normal for fey. She stared up at him a moment, then screwed her eyes shut and gave another loud moan, twisting and writhing again. “Oh, please ... please help me!”

Snatch stared down suspiciously as the mermaid wriggled. Something was off about this. She was not alone down there.

His hand groped around in his satchel and retrieved its contents: A vial filled with red liquid. He glanced away from the sordid display. “Nerka. Something invisible, I think. I gotta get this on her, but I ain’t getting close.” He raised his voice as the mermaid below let out another shrill moan. “Got any ideas?”

Nerka stuck her tongue in the side of her cheek, thinking. Then she grabbed the vial, unstopped the lid, and sucked the contents into her mouth.

“Hey!” Snatch protested.

Nerka ignored him, apparently swishing the fluid around. She froze. Turning, the mermaid fixed Snatch with a look of stunned horror.

“What? Like that’s my fau—”

Nerka turned back and spewed the substance out. It carried through the water like an arrow through air, moving almost independently of the water around it and splashing all over the bottom of the pit. She whirled on him again. “What the fuck was that? That—”

“Seer’s blood!”

“You had me drinking human blood—”

“It shows invisible stuff! I didn’t go telling you to swallow it!”

“It’s how the magic works! You could at least have—uh, hang on.”

She and Snatch both looked back down.

The blood had splashed quite violently, speckling the floor and mermaid’s face with errant droplets of some dead seer’s life fluid. Snatch was pretty sure the seer had been named ‘Waron’.

But the majority of the blood had landed on—or in—something else entirely.

It was almost humanoid. Snatch squinted reflexively, but the problem wasn’t the dark. There just wasn’t much to see. The blood hadn’t hit some invisible enemy, as he’d expected. It had...settled within something else.

The thing seemed to turn. The jelly maid remained prone as it did so. It seemed to stare up at Snatch, and for a moment, the blood inside the ooze-like mass mixed in with the creature’s “head”, revealing a faint crimson shape.

It was the head of a young woman. Snatch couldn’t tell if she was glaring or smiling at him, and he wasn’t sure which would be more unsettling.

A moment later, the blood started to dilute. Snatch could still see where the thing was, but its shape was gone. It rose up to eye level, then turned and slithered up, gaining speed as it streamed down the far passage. Chilling, feminine laughter trailed after.

Snatch didn’t even consider a chase. In fact, he snorted at the very notion. Maybe if Larya had been there. Maybe if he’d had a better weapon than these crap spears. Maybe if he hadn’t thought it was definitely a trap. But it definitely was, he didn’t, and she wasn’t. So instead he jumped down and settled on the ground next to the shuddering jelly maid.

“Careful!” Nerka called, keeping her distance. “Don’t touch her!”

Snatch hadn’t planned to, though now that he was closer, he saw that the maid’s hair was not white braids as he’d previously thought. It was more tentacles. The thick kind. Her head was covered in them like a gorgon. Not that he’d ever seen a gorgon.

She lay there, gasping for breath, eyed tightly shut. She was clearly exhausted. Merfolk had no stamina, according to Larya, but fey could survive a long time without food. Perhaps she’d been held like this for days—weeks, even.

He poked her with the stick.

Her eyes opened.

She slowly turned, looking at Snatch. Her pink eyes were wide. She reached up, brushing the blood droplets from her forehead. “Y-you saved me.” Her voice was echoey, crackly, even, like a message through a faulty communication spell. The strange mermaid pushed herself up, then slowly rose into the water, her tentacles dancing about as if testing that they still worked. “Thank you.”

“Yeah. Damn good sight of luck we came across you down here.”

“’Luck’ had nothing to do with it, I fear.” The jelly maid shivered. “What they did to me ... I’m the last. I knew the Slick Trench was dangerous, but I didn’t ...” She whimpered. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“They’re some sort of slime,” Nerka said, descending down on the jelly maid’s other side. “Very strange. What’s your name?”

“Chrysa.”

“Well, ‘Chrysa’,” Snatch said, grimacing, “no offense, but I think you’re right—’luck’ doesn’t have much to do with much of nothing.” He shifted his right arm, mainly to remind Chrysa that there was still a spear clenched there. “What are the odds we just happen to find you? Of all the caves we coulda entered?”

Chrysa cringed. “This ... I lived in a higher part of the Trench. I wanted to stay as close to the sun as possible. And you just happened to find me because they’ve been keeping me like this for months!”

“Why? Why you?”

“The rest … they … they finished.” Chrysa barely breathed the last word. She looked at Snatch, settling slowly below him—as if trying to emphasize her helplessness. “Please.”

Snatch thought about it. He’d never fallen for the ‘damsel in distress’ trap, and he didn’t plan to start now. Damsels were just as troubled as anyone else, but they didn’t just show up to be distressed right in an adventurer’s way. But something about Chrysa made him unsure. There was a desperation in there that was hard to fake. He was good at reading people, and even with those eyes, she seemed genuinely frantic. But a cliché was a cliché.

Chrysa seemed to sense his uncertainty. She bit her lip. Her breasts bounced slightly in the water as she pushed her chest out. “Is there … something I can offer you that might … ease your worries?”

“Yeah, no.” Snatch was getting tired of hanging around fey. He almost missed Larya—at least she generally drew their attention off him. “Look, okay, how about you just—”

“Ooorrr,” Chrysa said, and her dainty voice had a dark edge to it this time, “maybe you need more than an offer.”

Snatch followed her gaze. Chrysa’s settling down had given her tentacles a bit of room to creep along the floor. One of them had settled gently on the top of his boot. Right next to bare skin.

He looked up at her. She grinned wickedly.

Before he could react, or even speak, the tentacle tightened. He yelped, feeling a momentary pain. Then … his leg was gone.

“Snatch!” Behind Chrysa, Nerka dove away as two tentacles slithered towards her.

Snatch felt more tentacles touching him, coiling under his shirt and breeches. More little stings followed, followed by...nothing.

He felt himself drifting, very slowly, backwards. He watched Nerka swim frantically back up. Watched Chrysa’s tentacles lunge out, grasping around Nerka’s salmon tail. Heard Nerka’s startled intake of breath.

Then Snatch had fallen back too far to see. He felt tentacles lovingly caressing along his neck, leaving more little stings, and then ...

* * *

Nerka half-swam, half-crawled along the walls of the deep cavern, pulling herself along. She could barely stay off the ground.

Fey were almost always resistant to other fey’s attacks. It wasn’t the attacks that got them. It was usually more about ... well, fey weren’t known for their practices of abstinence.

The point was, the poison of a jelly maid had a slightly limited effect on her. Thank goodness. But it still felt like her tail was miles away from her. She wondered that she could get it to move at all—it was normally such a disobedient creature.

She forced her rattled mind to order as she kept following the cavern wall. She just had to keep going. Snatch was down; possibly dead. That wasn’t disastrous; they’d known there would likely be casualties when Mylio had decided to hire humans. The creatures were slimes, and they were doing something to the girls they’d taken. She had to find Larya and Mylio.

She heard a ghostly giggle.

“Larya?” It did sound almost like the druidess. Almost. “Are you there?”

“Ooh...am I?”

Nerka blinked. She couldn’t see the fork—surely they were still quite far from her fickle mate and his powerless plaything.

She noticed a few holes in the wall nearby. The mermaid frowned. Snatch had initially taken those holes to be traps, but closer examination had showed them to lead to perfectly natural breaks in the stone. Geologically speaking, Nerka had been skeptical, but now...

She pulled herself forward, filled with curiosity, and peered through one of the holes.

Something wet and sticky surged out and covered her face.

“Mmf!” Nerka cried, suddenly smothered. She scrabbled and fell, sinking to the bottom amid her frantic struggles. The wet, sticky thing had wrapped around her head and shoulders in less than an instant. She could barely breathe. She tried to raise her arms, and these were promptly plucked away from her with casual ease, like one might pluck away a toy sword from a toddler who had been misbehaving with it. Before she knew what was happening, her arms had been forced down to her sides.

She tried to will her tail to flap. Her half-paralyzed tail had other plans. In fact, the part of it that wasn’t paralyzed seemed to be flicking cheerfully, as if it—

“Nnnh...nnah...” Nerka wriggled, realizing her upper body was completely encased in the invisible mass. And it felt...

...nice.

Merfolk did not have sex organs. Snatch had been right about this much. But they definitely had orgasms. Oh, did they. Their whole bodies—their arms, their lips, their breasts in particular—were incredibly sensitive, in fact. Erotically sensitive.

Nerka moaned as the gooey mass began to rub and stroke around her. It started slow. Agonizingly slow. And even so, the very second the sensation started, she already felt like she was going to come. The next second, she already felt more pleasure than she had felt in all her years of lust. And the next second, she’d already decided she was going to give in.

At least, a part of her had. She started panting, her moans getting louder—all muffled by the slime surrounding her hot, naked body. “Mm...mm...aagh!”

It kept twisting around her. She tried to buck, to thrust her chest, to touch herself. No.

“So nice,” cooed a voice in her right ear.

“Do we like this?” cooed the same voice in her left.

“Do we want more?”

“Pleaaaaaah!” Nerka trembled violently, unable to shake as her pleasure-driven nervous system commanded. She was utterly helpless. Her eyes widened as she realized just how serious her predicament was.

“Was that a ‘please’?” teased the voice. “Ooh, I think it was.”

But it hadn’t been! Had it? Nerka didn’t know. And as the slime started stroking even faster along her body, she found she was losing the ability to...to...

“Mmm. Mm. Mmmm.” Nerka shivered, her back arching ever-so-slightly. She felt a sudden motionlessness, and realized that she—within her giggling cocoon—had just landed on the floor. She whimpered. She had only been going through this for a few seconds now. How much longer could she survive with such...such...

The slime continued its steady stroking, rolling around her sensitive skin like the caress of a million lovers’ wet, sticky tongues. She felt her tail twitching excitedly—completely unconstrained, and completely uninterested in putting up a fight. Typical.

“Mmm. Mm, ooomf.” Such thoughts again were lost by the incessant sensation. She wriggled slightly, trying very hard to convince herself she was trying to escape. But in reality she just wanted more.

“Nice?” said the voice again, giggling.

Nerka opened her eyes, nodding helplessly. “Mm-hm.”

“And we want mooore?” The voice giggled again.

“Mm-hm!” The sounds were out before Nerka could stop them. She cursed herself for her weakness, just as the slime trailed sensuously along her lips, blinding her for a moment with sheer bliss. Her conscious mind barely heard the voice’s next words.

“We can give more, you sweet little girl.” The slime rubbed over her pert nipples, sliding under and between her breasts with increased urgency. “So much more.”

“SO much,” the voice echoed, a bit darkly, in her other ear.

“Unnm...ummm...” Nerka’s moans dissolved into sighs as the slime started to move faster on her. More? How could there possibly be—ohhhh...

“This can be everything,” whispered the voice, sounding triumphant. “This can be your everything.”

“Obedient.”

“Full of lust.”

“Constant pleasure.”

Nerka gasped as the slime delicately pulled her arms apart, like fingers opening up a flower, causing a sudden new wave of sensation to hit her like a tidal wave. She shook, desperate for her orgasm. Her orgasms. Constant pleasure. But they weren’t coming.

“Obeeedience,” sang the voice. Nerka felt something like a tongue along her neck. It felt like a whole host of rough tongues was running over her, stimulating her beyond what her staggered mind could stand, bathing her in that wonderful, delicious slime.

She felt her nipples tingling, and dimly realized exactly what was happening to her. She realized how close she was to losing everything. To being their slutty puppet. To submitting utterly. The slime swirled around her tits, lifting them and forcing them against the current, maximizing the sensation. She realized how good it could feel—how good it could always feel. The slime tickled her arms, her lips, driving her mad with desire. She realized how cruelly she was being played, how totally, utterly, deliciously helpless she was against her sensuous assailant. The slime trickled inside her mouth and filled her with something chemical, making her head spin, making her moan uncontrollably. She realized how foul this force was, how much danger they were all in, exactly what it was going to do to all of them. To her. Forever.

At the same moment, she realized she could speak.

“More,” she whispered. “M-more. Please. Please take me.”

The slime kept running over her. She started to pant, then to whine. Why wasn’t she climaxing? “Obedience,” the voice cooed again. “Submission.”

Nerka hesitated for just a moment.

“Ooooh.” The voice giggled in her ear, tickling her inner lobe. “Do we not wanna fuck anymore? We we not ready to drink? To be drunk from?”

“Are we no fun for you? Oh...” Nerka could swear that the speaker was pouting.

The slime abruptly halted. Just like that. The sensations stopped. The pleasure stopped. It all stopped.

“N-no!” Nerka cried out. “Oh, please! I’ll be yours! I’ll be—I’ll be obedient!” A piece of her broke as she said the word. And it felt so good.

“Are you suuure?” coaxed the voice. “Maybe you want us to let you go.”

“No. Nononononono. I can be a good slut. I can be a good slut. I’ll drink. I’ll drink.” Nerka tried to touch herself, to stroke herself, but she was still held fast. Helpless. Desperate. She would give them anything. Everything. If only...

“Hm. So you want to be ours?” The voice was as smug as a sea otter in a mussel bed. “We’re gonna keep you going ’til you can’t even remember your own name. You’ll be nothing but sex. Ours. A hot little slave. We’ll keep you screaming for aaaages. Is that what you want, pretty girl? Is that what you need from us? We’d love to help you, if only you’ll give the word. Do we want that, our pretty little pet?”

Nerka realized she was being pulled somewhere. She could barely see, wherever it was, and it felt very small and confined. She was being dragged into darkness, deepest darkness. If she gave in now, that was it. She would emerge as a...a...

The slime pinched her nipple gently. She felt a tiny droplet of liquid seep out.

The mermaid whimpered.